Zak Rosen, TC ’20

We found ourselves in a strange heaven, a garden beneath water. Yet, it refused the texture of wetness. The light from fathoms above flew down to us like the atomies of stained glass. This place pretended itself a church; it forgot the masquerade of a sacred place but I felt that whirlpool awe of alter-steeple-prayer all the same. We reach forward for the platinum rays that swim around us, solid as warm mud, melt like softest metal in our fingers. We smile at each other and at the other graces in this garden beyond where anyone has walked. Shrimp glow fuchsia, manta rays of the deepest obsidian dart tails as fluid as cats, dolphins and lantern fish, all of it rockets in a lazy tornado of undersurf. The kelp trees anchor dozens of round, pale blue spheres and whether these pieces are organic-of-plant or organic-of-flesh we can not say.

We grasp in our innumerable of innumerable hands and teeth at these impossible fruits, pluck them and pull them to our mouths. They taste of sweet and of meat and a single bite is satiate. We open our palms and the uneaten floats up up up to the beyond razor shadow of water above — air so far that sea-level is our sky, impossible bread melting out into bubbles.

It is now that the sirens come, bodies boneless in motion, currents of grandest oceans and their music…reminds us it is impossible to die in a place that does not exist, in a place of dreams, in a place out of time, in an endless place, a place that has always existed and will always exist — the garden beneath the waves, an amalgam of all this. We become water and silt, and the gentle up-down-rock of hydrogen-oxygen-hydrogen.

The sirens swim wielding nets of cartilage. They wrap us with the soft hands of a mother weaving blankets about her infant, tickle fingers on the belly and we giggle at the sensation of almost-bone on our skin. We are the sea, of these ancient scaled beings, though we forget in the high-dry spaces, cities built even beyond sand. The sea does not forget us. Lungs and brow of salt and water, our makers must simply tug our chains.

The siren nails whittle beneath our ribs like a crab burrowing into soft, warm mud. It tickles like the nets they’ve got us in, and the lights glow miasmic as they run their teeth along our spines. It is a simple desire, to become one with the world, but it is ours. The sirens shall help us, as they surely will you when the time comes.

A Feast of Argonauts was originally published in The Yale Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.